Mapping the Coastline: Project Planning in Unknown Territory
Perhaps the most misunderstood thing about digital project management is that much of the job revolves around making educated guesses. We collect user research, client feedback, and team input to estimate scopes and develop timelines, but still, these are predictions. What’s more, it can be difficult to know what level of detail to include at which stage in a project, and how to keep those...
Gen Z Is Ready for College — Is Your College Ready for Them?
Millennials or “Gen Y” are commonly referred to as those born between 1986 and 1996, two decades during which technology flourished. The World Wide Web was created, you could call someone without being at your home, and DVDs changed the way we watched reruns of Seinfeld. Those who were born during these years grew up with on-demand service and unlimited streaming. Hundreds if not thousands of...
Creating a Simple Email Analytics Spreadsheet That Your Clients Will Love
The content of your emails communicates a story to your subscribers — and the behavior metrics of your subscribers communicates an important story back to you. Being able to track their open and click rates is one of the huge benefits of email marketing. In fact, put simply, if you’re not taking the time to stop and review your data , you may as well be sending a physical mailing. Luckily, nearly...
Black, White & Shades of Gray: Leveraging Discovery to Write a Better Brand Story
While product, market, and user research are all now widely recognized as key components of product design, this wasn’t always the case. For a long time, we thought good ideas automatically made good products, good brands, and good marketing. (Remember Mad Men’s “It’s Toasted” success?) But taking on product design without doing research is the equivalent of having a conversation without...
Digital First — Rethinking the College Viewbook
Over the years, we have worked with many colleges and universities on a wide array of marketing materials, and we have found one common denominator when it comes to traditional student viewbooks: They tend to look and sound the same. The formulaic approach that so many colleges take to this printed brochure geared towards incoming students generally includes uninspired photography — students...
Tapping Into Emotion: 10 Tips for Driving Connections in Higher Ed Marketing
When it comes to the higher education experience, what are the hidden drivers of emotion? The elements that shape students’ lifelong aspirational connections to one university versus another? These are complex questions, with no clear-cut answers, especially when it comes to the science behind marketing, content, and the college connection. Obviously, what tugs at the heartstrings of one student...
Email Personalization and Segmentation: How to Maintain Relevance
As we prepare for our participation in the Greater Philadelphia Culture Alliance’s Annual Meeting, the focus of this year’s meeting — relevance — got us thinking. In pondering how organizations are maintaining relevance with their messaging, I really dug in and thought about all of the ways that email, in particular, can be used as a tool to stay relevant. With topics related to specific target...
Is It Done Yet?: My Journey Into Digital Project Management
I have been a Project Manager for as long as I can remember. My career started by accident (as many PM’s stories go), but here I am. I’ve been managing design projects for almost 10 years, from Philadelphia to New York and back to Philadelphia again. I’m here today to tell you about my transition from managing those design projects to managing the development of a website. My inherent optimism...
A Nomad Life: What Traveling the World Taught Me About UX
To date, I have lived in five countries and eight cities, including Caracas, Aix en Provence, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. I have also had the opportunity to learn three languages that I can now proudly say I speak fluently, in addition to my own mother tongue, Spanish. My travels and personal learnings have contributed greatly to my interest in human-centered design and user experience...
The Best Tools for Building an Email Template
In 2018, email marketing is more important than ever . As Eastern Standard’s digital content specialist, my job is made simpler because our clients write the email copy, and our amazing designers decide how the emails should look, while I build a new email campaign by repurposing our responsive block-based HTML email templates. Still, to make my contribution to the process go as smoothly as...
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